We are piloting an innovative active outreach and public-private collaboration model, in which community members are hired and professionally trained to visit urban slums and boarding houses to find, educate and link undeserved TB patients with free treatment from both the public TB care system and our network of participating private doctors. During treatment, we aim to ensure that all 880 patients in the district finish their antibiotic treatment to prevent the development of drug resistance.
Tuberculosis kills as many people as the population of Manhattan, while more new people fall sick with TB than there are Swedish citizens each year. Yet, as the pandemic mainly affects developing countries, global apathy, ignorance and poverty have allowed a fully curable disease to thrive among undeserved communities and undetected patients to allow it to mutate into more virulent, drug-resistant forms - some nearly incurable! We must eradicate TB before we lose the ability to do so.
With your donation, you will fund an innovative, holistic TB care model in Vietnam that combines a symbiotic linkage between public and private health sectors with patient-centric outreach, counseling and advocacy. This is accomplished through three strategies: 1. partner with the public TB care system; 2. enroll private doctors as government-endorsed neighborhood treatment providers; and 3. employ community members to actively detect new cases and follow up on antibiotics-abusing patients.
Primarily, the project will detect 200 patients that would have been missed by the passive healthcare system and ensure that all 880 TB patients in the district complete treatment - while creating 19 new jobs for the community. Yet, our long-term goal is to demonstrate the effectiveness of this model, expand implementation to other parts of Vietnam and advocate adoption of our best practices in active outreach and public-private collaboration in TB control with the Ministry of Health.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
